Well it does make sense with them being clear gamers are not the target audience they don’t want a review that may reveal issues due to content not being made/optimized for it.
Ie a commercial environment like Disney might have an xp tailored to take advantage of the headset’s features. However if they see an unfavorable review it might dissuade some from investing and developing an experience on it.
So Acer is likely to be very selective in whom they send a DeV kit too. Once there is specialized content and such created Acer will likely remove their current restrictions. But only time will tell.
Actually in my conversation they did tell me that in the last 2 years, there simply were all these incompatibility issues, since it was not fully OpenVR compatible. Now with this compatibility being there, StarVR seemed more open to have me check it out. So I am still discussing this with them right now.
I think some folks have been rubbed the wrong way by this news since we heard before that anyone could buy it. However entirely see their point on why its primarily for design studios/enterprise dev. Since all of the demos they have had in the past were either arcade units with warehouse IR tracking or SteamVR experiences that were likely customized by them via SDK implementation. And like others have said if a bunch of gamers get their hands on it and all of a sudden 95% of steam library does not work on it then the reviews will start popping up everywhere saying that it is a $3200 paper weight of an HMD. Which obviously could have an impact on business buying it as well. But we all forget that this is at this point in time, despite their previous marketing meant to be an inhouse tool to help with design tasks from CGI/CAD and for specialized simulators where a dedicated team of engineers can tweak the settings all day to their liking within their own environment. To my knowledge few on this forum could do such tweaks even with StarVR SDK access and likely you would need enterprise support from them anyhow when you run into issues. What would be more concerning to me is if game builds will require an update with StarVR tools running alongside. Because that would mean engine changes would need to be made in order to run the games properly.
They should release a “StarVR Consumer” headset which is the exact same headset but made fully compatible with all SteamVR games. That way they can tailor to consumers and when people post reviews it’ll be about the “StarVR Consumer” or whatever it’s called and not the StarVR One.
Its getting there, I think considering on their site they are just now releasing Unity guides for devs it will take some time to get the ball rolling. Unreal is already supported out of the box, but it is not clear without delving into documentation how well other custom engines will work with StarVR at this time.
Unreal (or Unity) support will probably mean that they have some kind of plugin for those engines, which interfaces directly with their software stack, so you would not need to code against OpenVR (for example). I am not sure it will mean that for example a game written in Unreal engine (for OpenVR or Oculus), will automatically run on StarVR native VR stack.
This is something that is typically done in time. Now it is Surprising with A lot of VR headset companies playing it “safe” that they Don’t make headsets between 130 to 150° Wide. Opposed to sticking with 100 to 110 wide.
Indeed. This is in part why Oculus has shelved Half Dome for now as it will also require newer rendering techniques much like Canted Displays with Parallel Projections. There is a great article/blog on is it Journey to Infinite? He released the Article after attending Berlin Backer Meetup in Sept 2018.
anyway form the simple point of view of any customer, paying 3 times the price of a pimax to get something that is finally vey close in useability is not for regular consumer.
They should really bring something that makes the difference to justify such price.
well that is precisely why it is not a consumer device at this time. StarVR could care less that this price point is too high for the average VR consumer because that is not their intended audience right now. As far as us plebs are concerned this is on the back burner right now since its unlikely that we will getting our hands on one in the immediate future. Pimax sorting their distortion will likely happen before we get StarVR as consumers or there will be another headset along the way. Samsung is supposedly working an a round screen/round lens high fov design.
